"A 'big office' in Spain is not the same size as a 'big office' in England!
Steelcase is a specialist in workspace design* and is present in more than twenty countries. Steelcase keeps a close eye on different cultures and changing demands in terms of design*.
What changes have you seen in development over the last two years?
Post-confinement, the question of the place and its uses is central. Underlying this, of course, is the meaning and image that it conveys of a company's culture. In order to attract employees, we conceive of offices as 'neighbourhoods': single-use neighbourhoods no longer work? Single-use offices don't work either. Take the example of the cafeteria: no company designs it like the one in the famous "caméra café" series! We're creating "workcafé" areas, where you can have a coffee, of course, but there's also a videoconferencing area, a box for making emergency phone calls... That's where the ideas come from - the place has to be just right!
What is it about WorkLife Paris that reflects your vision of the office?
We tried to quantify the number of ways of working that could be adopted in our offices... and quickly stopped counting. Because if you take all the parameters into account (digital, hybrid, open, closed, formal, informal, etc.), the possibilities are almost infinite. Today we pay particular attention to the quality of hybrid meetings, with impeccable sound and image. 70% of meetings are held with at least one remote person: they need to be at the same level of commitment as the others, not reduced to miniatures a few centimetres tall on a screen.
Do we work together in the same way in Madrid as we do in London or Paris?
There are underlying global trends and a need for uniformity due to international collaborations where travel is very frequent. But there are still differences. It's true that in Spain, the different temperatures mean that people work at different speeds throughout the day. In France, we are the 'champions' of individualised, sometimes enclosed spaces, which is much less in demand in Anglo-Saxon countries, where the number of dedicated offices fell twice as fast as in France after the pandemic. Other examples: we all have a zone of privacy around us... but the size of this zone is not the same in European countries. A 'large office' in Spain is not the same size as a 'large office' in the UK. This can sometimes be a matter of a few centimetres, but in terms of space-planning, on the scale of a building, it has major repercussions. In the UK, it's normal to work at a desk that's one metre twenty, elegant or designer, whereas in Germany, where the functional aspect takes precedence, the norm is to work at a desk that can be adjusted in height.
